Montana (25 page)

“I didn’t tell you I was writing a story,” she retorted.

“What kind of lawyer would I be if I didn’t do my research? You left your name on my voicemail. I looked you up. Of course you’re doing a story. It’s your nature to find out things. You’re like the scorpion that stings the frog carrying it across the river. You can’t help yourself. Even if it means”—he pulled a linen handkerchief from his pocket and coughed wetly into it—“you die.”

Lola thought that Gallagher sounded like the one who was about to die. “What can I possibly give you?” What could Mary Alice have given him? One of her grandmother’s teacups for his collection?

Gallagher lowered the handkerchief from his mouth and dropped it in his lap, drawing her unwilling gaze to his shrunken legs. “Travel is difficult for me. As you can see. But you’ve spent years in one of the world’s most storied locations. Barbarism! Tyranny! Blood running in the streets! Give me something of that. Tell me a story in exchange for the one you want from me. Play Scheherazade to my poor King Shahryar.” He lifted the teapot and held it above her cup. His knuckles were swollen, the back of his hand puffy, distended. “Yes?”

Lola calculated the tea she’d already drunk, along with the latte that preceded it, and wondered if she’d be able to get through even a short story without having to excuse herself to use the restroom.

“Tell him,” Jan urged.

Lola crossed her legs. “When I went to Afghanistan the first time,” she began, “you couldn’t fly in. The Americans were still bombing Kabul. The border with Pakistan was closed. The only way in was through Tajikistan, overland across the border into territory still held by the Northern Alliance and then on through contested territory to get as close to Kabul as we could. We crossed the Oxus”—

“The Oxus,” Gallagher sighed. “In the very footsteps of Alexander the Great.”

“We floated across on a raft. There were men on the raft with grenade launchers and on the far shore, on the other side of a hill, you could hear mortars. They made a big thump when they blew. Closer by, there was a popping noise—like someone stepping on bubble wrap—and they told me it was rifle fire. It sounded innocuous, but there it was, and I wanted to ask the man to turn the raft around so I could get to shore and fire up the satellite phone and call my editor and tell him I was coming home.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.” Lola cleared her throat. “It was sunset. It looked as though the entire horizon was on fire. But overhead, the stars were coming out. Thousands, millions of them. You could see the Milky Way. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen so many stars. I stared at them and tried to lose myself in their light in the hopes that if I caught a bullet, the last thing I saw would be something beautiful.”

Gallagher shook out his handkerchief again, examined it, and folded it back into a palm-sized square. “It’s a good story. Yes. I’ll tell you mine about Johnny Running Wolf.”

Lola’s fingers itched for a pen. She saw Jan succumb to the same impulse, reaching for her recorder, and mouthed
no
.

“His mother was aboriginal and his father, too, but when he wasn’t much older than a toddler, his mother left his father and married a white man and went to live outside Chicago. Johnny got one of your good suburban educations. He went by John Wolf then. As I understand it, he went back to his real name once he left his stepfather’s home. His nose is a fright—I think he said something about boxing in high school—but other than that, he was a good-looking fellow. His grades weren’t perfect, but good enough for us to accept him.”

“Why here?” Lola asked, breaking her own rule about interrupting a source once he started talking. “Why not Chicago? There are plenty of good law schools there.”

Gallagher paused so long that she wished she’d just kept her mouth shut. “His mother was a Blood,” he said finally, as if that explained everything.

Lola didn’t understand, but didn’t want to stop him again. She dug her fingers into her palms, as if she could capture her own words there, keep them from escaping.

Jan supplied her answer. “That’s how the Blackfeet are known in Canada. Same tribe, different whitepeople name for them. The border doesn’t matter to them, but I imagine it does when it comes to law schools looking to admit students, right, Dr. Gallagher?”

“That’s right,” Gallagher said and Lola uncurled her fingers as he went on. “We recruit widely for promising students. And he performed well once he got here. At least, at first.”

“Then what?” Jan again. Lola glared at her.

Gallagher made a series of small motions, shifting in his chair. “He drank. It can be an issue with people from our First Nations. He pulled himself together for a while, enough to graduate, and to get a job in the legal department of one of our local corporations. But the last I heard, he’d started drinking again and got fired. We’d see him on the streets once in a while, cadging change. Tragic. End of story.” He steepled quivering fingers beneath his chin. Lola wondered if he were ill.

“But he must have pulled himself together.” She couldn’t lose anything by speaking up now. “Well enough to run for governor. It’s odd that Mary Alice didn’t write any of that.”

“Clearly he recovered, and quite well, too. Why dredge it up? It does no one any good. I’m sorry to be of no use to you.” He lowered himself back into his wheelchair, forestalling further questions.

Lola and Jan followed him back into the hallway, lighted now, students drifting past, toting volumes beneath their arms, dark circles beneath their eyes. The border might have mattered in terms of who got accepted where, Lola thought, but law school’s toll on its students was universal.

“My condolences on the loss of your friend,” Gallagher said. He closed the office door behind him. A lock clicked.

Jan swayed backward down the hallway, bending at the waist, drawing her hand veil-like across her face and then waving her arms in an approximation of a dance, her harsh words at odds with her exotic movements.

“Tell me a story, Scheherazade. In fact, tell me this. Exactly which one of us got played here today?”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

J
an and Lola walked back across campus in a brittle silence that lasted until they stood before the coffee shop where they’d begun their morning.

Traffic streamed past in a rise and fall of purposeful sound. Jan spoke into one of the pauses. “We should leave now. Cut our losses on a wasted day.”

Lola pushed open the coffee shop door. “We’re not going anywhere. Two lattes,” she told the clerk. “Triple shots. We’re going to be up late.” She put a twenty on the counter.

“Don’t you have Canadian?” the barista asked. He wore a cowboy-style snap-front shirt over Hawaiian shorts, and hiking boots with no socks. Lola couldn’t tell if he meant to be ironic or had just dressed in a hurry.

“I know. BOHIC. Where’s your restroom?”

When she returned, Jan had taken her own latte to a corner table and left Lola’s on the counter. She jingled her car keys in a warning as Lola approached. “You seem to forget I’m the one driving. You can stay here if you want. I’m going home. I’d like to salvage what’s left of my weekend. Good luck getting that fake Italian chick back across the border.”

Lola hooked her ankle around a chair leg and pulled it away from the table, turned it around and straddled it. “If you really meant to leave me here, you’d have gone while I was still in the bathroom. Don’t bluff. You’re bad at it. And we don’t have time for it. We’ve got too much to do.”

“Such as?”

“One of us—me, actually—is going to go back to the law building to spend some time in the library looking through the yearbooks for all the years Johnny Running Wolf was a student here, and the alumni bulletins for every year since he graduated. And you’re going to go to the university bookstore and buy anything Gallagher’s written. If he’s like every other professor on the planet, he’ll assign his own books to his students. Then go through them. Just look for anything that grabs your attention. Trust your instincts. If something makes you stop and look twice, it’s significant. Look for his publications on the Web, too. I meant to before we left, but I didn’t have time.” She thumbed some bills from the rubber-banded bundle in her pocket, thought a minute, and added more. “That should take care of the BOHIC. Why don’t we meet back here in, say, four hours?”

Jan set her jaw. “This is insane. The guy can’t help us. He sure didn’t help Mary Alice. He didn’t even tell her that the guy drank.”

“We don’t know that Gallagher didn’t tell her. She just didn’t write it. Why, I don’t know. I think she was saving it for a bigger story. Gallagher told us about it because he wanted us to know. He just doesn’t want anything coming back on him. Which is fine with me. I’d rather have it all to myself anyway.” She stood up and carried her cup to the counter.

Jan hurried behind, calling, “To ourselves, you mean. It’s our story. We’re working on it together. So you meant to say ourselves, right?”

“Yeah,” Lola said. “Right.”

A
N HOUR
into her search, Lola had unearthed only two photos and a single paragraph in an alumni bulletin. The yearbook lay open to Johnny’s formal portrait, his features behind the ruined nose sharper then, thin lips clamped defiantly against the smile—either triumphant or merely relieved—sported by so many of his fellow graduates. The other photo was the sort of candid shot used to brighten columns of dreary type about the students’ accomplishments. In it, two shirtless young men leaned against one another, arms held high, fists encased in puffy boxing gloves. The pose accentuated Johnny’s youthful leanness, shoulder blades like scythes, ribs defining a hairless torso. His companion looked as though he outweighed Johnny by a good fifty pounds, a pad of flesh bulging over the shiny stuff of his shorts. Beneath a beetling mustache, his upper lip was split and swollen and an unerring strike had charcoaled a half-moon beneath his left eye. The caption writer played it law-school cute: “Vince Fantonelli guilty of underestimating the strategy of Johnny Running Wolf.” Six years later, the alumni bulletin reported: “Together again—Faculty of Law chums (’95) Vince Fantonelli and Johnny Running Wolf reunite at Fantonelli Transport, where Running Wolf will work in the legal division.”

Lola tapped a text to Jan: “See if there’s anything about a Fantonelli Transport in Gallagher’s stuff.” She opened her laptop to search for herself. She found the company on the first click. It had started decades earlier in Chicago as a trash hauler, moving to corner the market on carrying nuclear waste to Nevada—hence, a branch in Las Vegas—but as that field waned, the company had found a far more lucrative focus in the booming agricultural and oil markets just north of the border. Lola clicked through screen after screen of flatbeds and tankers and slatted cattle trailers that dwarfed the hard-hatted company executives standing next to them on the occasion of opening yet another new office, this one in Calgary. Lola went to the list of directors. Vince Fantonelli looked to be a man in his sixties, his face a series of layers melting into one another, brow to cheeks to chin, jowls indistinguishable from neck. There was no bio. Just a single word—founder. Lola flipped back through the yearbook to the boxers, knowing already that Johnny’s sparring partner was far too young to be the man on the computer screen. They had to be father and son.

She paged back through the yearbook until she came to Vince Junior’s portrait. Unlike Johnny, he beamed at the camera. Glossy dark hair waved thickly away from an assertive forehead that sat brick-like atop broad features. But when she went back to Fantonelli Transport’s website, she found no mention of a Vince Junior. She typed “Vincent Fantonelli” into Google and wasn’t surprised that the first entry was an obituary. Heart attack, she thought, given the excessive avoirdupois of the company’s founder. Or a stroke. She wondered if Vince Junior had inherited the company. Maybe Fantonelli Transport’s website just hadn’t been updated with that information, she thought. She clicked on the obituary. She stared at the screen, then at the yearbook lying open in her lap. This time, the photos matched. The obituary was for Vincent Fantonelli Junior and apparently it had taken quite a bit more than a heart attack to kill him. He’d been murdered.